Some Terminology
Computer hard disks and other computer storage devices hold digital data which represents numbers, names, dates, texts, pictures, sounds, and other information used by businesses, individuals, government agencies, and others. To help organize the data, and for technical reasons, many computers divide the data into drives, partitions, directories, and files. The terms "file" and "directory" are familiar to most computer users, and most people agree on their meaning even though the details of written definitions vary.
However, the terms "partition" and "drive" have different meanings even when the context is limited to computers. According to some definitions, a partition is necessarily limited to one storage device but a "file system" may include one or more partitions on one or more disks. Many partitions reside on a single disk, but some use volume sets, stripe sets, mirror sets, or other approaches to store a single partition's data on more than one disk.
As used here, a "partition" is a region on one or more storage devices which is (or can be) formatted to contain one or more files or directories. A partition may be empty. A partition may also be in active use even without any directories, file allocation tables, bitmaps, or similar file system structures if it holds a stream or block of raw data. Each formatted partition is tailored to a particular type of file system, such as the Macintosh file system, SunOS file system, Windows NT File System ("NTFS"), NetWare file system, or one of the MS-DOS/FAT file systems (MACINTOSH is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.; SUNOS is a trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc.; WINDOWS NT and MS-DOS are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation; NETWARE is a trademark of Novell, Inc.). Partition manipulation may include manipulation of file system data within the partition. A file system need not fill the partition which holds it, either in the sense that all sectors within the partition are used by the file system or in the sense that all sectors within the partition are recognized by the file system as being present.
"Drive" is sometimes used interchangeably with "partition," especially in references to logical drive C: or another logical drive holding the operating system on so-called Wintel machines. But "drive" may also refer to a single physical storage device such as a magnetic hard disk or a CD-ROM drive. To reduce confusion, "drive" will normally be used here to refer only to storage devices, not to partitions. Thus, it is accurate to note that a partition often resides on a single drive but may also span drives, and a drive may hold one or more partitions.